[D66] Critchley on The Silence of Animals

[Nord]

(Mystical-anarchist Critchley over Gray's 'Godless mysticism' en 
'passive nihilism'.  3600 woorden.)

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1722&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint


    Simon Critchley <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=917>onThe
    Silence of Animals


      John Gray’s Godless Mysticism

June 2nd, 2013

HUMAN BEINGS DO NOT just make killer apps. We are killer apes. We are 
nasty, aggressive, violent, rapacious hominids, what John Gray calls in 
his widely read 2002 book,/Straw Dogs/,/homo rapiens./But wait, it gets 
worse. We are a killer species with a metaphysical longing, ceaselessly 
trying to find some meaning to life, which invariably drives us into the 
arms of religion. Today’s metaphysics is called “liberal humanism,” with 
a quasi-religious faith in progress, the power of reason and the 
perfectibility of humankind. The quintessential contemporary liberal 
humanists are those Obamaists, with their grotesque endless 
conversations about engagement in the world and their conviction that 
history has two sides, right and wrong, and they are naturally on the 
right side of it.

Gray’s most acute loathing is for the idea of progress, which has been 
his target in a number of books, and which is continued in the rather 
uneventful first 80 pages or so of/The Silence of Animals./He allows 
that//progress in the realm of science is a fact. (And also a good: as 
Thomas De Quincey remarked, a quarter of human misery results from 
toothache, so the discovery of anesthetic dentistry is a fine thing.) 
But faith//in progress, Gray argues, is a superstition we should do 
without. He cites, among others, Conrad on colonialism in the Congo and 
Koestler on Soviet Communism (the Cold War continues to cast a long 
shadow over Gray’s writing) as evidence of the sheer perniciousness of a 
belief in progress. He contends, contra Descartes, that human 
irrationality is the thing most evenly shared in the world. To deny 
reality in order to sustain faith in a delusion is properly human. For 
Gray, the liberal humanist’s assurance in the reality of progress is a 
barely secularized version of the Christian belief in Providence.

With the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in mind, Gray writes in/Black 
Mass/(2007): “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.” 
Politics has become a hideous surrogate for religious salvation, and 
secularism is itself a religious myth. In/The Silence of Animals,/he 
writes, “Unbelief today should begin by questioning not religion but 
secular faith.” What most disturbs Gray are utopian political projects 
based on some faith that concerted human action in the world can allow 
for the realization of seemingly impossible political ends and bring 
about the perfection of humanity. As he makes explicit in/Black Mass,/he 
derives his critique of utopianism from Norman Cohn’s 1957 book,/The 
Pursuit of the Millennium./What Cohn implied but Gray loudly declares is 
that Western civilization can be defined in terms of the central role of 
millenarian thinking. Salvation is collective, terrestrial, imminent, 
total, and miraculous. What takes root with early Christian belief, and 
massively accelerates in medieval Europe, finds its modern continuation 
in a sequence of bloody utopian political projects, from Jacobinism to 
Bolshevism, Stalinism, Nazism, and different varieties of 
Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, or Situationist ideologies. They all 
promised to build heaven on earth and left us with hell instead.

In/Black Mass,/Gray persuasively attempted to show how the energy of 
such utopian political projects has driftedfrom the left to the right. 
Bush, Blair, and the rest framed the war on terror as an apocalyptic 
struggle that would forge the new American century of untrammeled 
personal freedom and free markets. During the first years of the new 
millennium, a religious fervor energized the project of what we might 
call “military neoliberalism”: violence was the means for realizing 
liberal democratic heaven on earth. The picture of a world at war where 
purportedly democratic regimes, like the USA, deploy terror in their 
alleged attempts to confront it is still very much with us, even if 
full-scale, classical military invasions have given way to the 
calculated cowardice of drone strikes and targeted assassinations.

Carl Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy led him towards an 
argument for dictatorship. Where does Gray’s loathing of liberalism 
leave him? He identifies the poison in liberal humanism, but what’s the 
antidote? It is what Gray calls “political realism”: we have to accept, 
as many ancient societies did and many non-Western societies still do, 
that the world is in a state of ceaseless conflict. Periods of war are 
followed by periods of peace, only to be followed by war again. What 
goes around comes around. And around. History makes more sense as a 
cycle than as a line of development or even decline.

In the face of such ceaseless conflict, Gray counsels that we have to 
abandon the belief in utopia and accept the tragic contingencies of 
life: there are moral and political dilemmas for which there are simply 
no solutions. We have to learn to abandon pernicious daydreams such as a 
new cosmopolitan world order governed by universal human rights, or that 
history has a teleological, providential purpose that underwrites human 
action. We even have to renounce the Obamaesque (in essence, 
crypto-Comtian or crypto-Saint-Simonian) delusion that one’s life is a 
narrative that is an episode in some universal story of progress. It is not.

Against the grotesque distortion of conservatism into the millenarian 
military neoliberalism, Gray wants to defend the core belief of 
traditional Burkean Toryism. The latter begins in a realistic acceptance 
of human imperfection and frailty. As such, the best that flawed and 
potentially wicked human creatures can hope for is a commitment to 
civilized constraints that will prevent the very worst from happening: a 
politics of the least worst. Sadly, no one in political life seems 
prepared to present this argument, least of all those contemporary 
conservatives who have become more utopian than their cynical pragmatist 
left-liberal counterparts, such as the British Labor Party.

¤

The most extreme expression of human arrogance, for Gray, is the idea 
that human beings can save the planet from environmental devastation. 
Because they are killer apes who will always deploy violence, force, and 
terror in the name of some longed-for metaphysical project, human beings 
cannot be trusted to save their environment. Furthermore — and this is 
an extraordinarily delicious twist — the earth doesn’t need saving. Here 
Gray borrows from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The ever-warming 
earth is suffering from/disseminated primatemaia,/a plague of 
people./Homo rapiens/is savagely ravaging the planet like a filthy pest 
that has infested a once beautiful, well-appointed, and spacious house. 
In 1600, the human population was about half a billion. In the 1990s it 
increased by the same amount. And the acceleration continues. What Gray 
takes from the Gaia hypothesis is that this plague cannot be solved by 
the very people who are its cause. It can only be solved by a 
large-scale decline in human numbers back down to manageable levels. 
Let’s go back to 1600!

Such is the exhilaratingly anti-humanist, dystopian, indeed 
Ballardesque, vision of a drowned world at the heart of Gray’s work: 
when the earth is done with humans, it will recover and the blip of 
human civilization will be forgotten forever. Global warming is simply 
one of the periodic fevers that the earth has suffered during its long, 
nonhuman history. It will recover and carry on. But we cannot and will not.

¤

Where does this leave us? Although Gray is critical of Heidegger’s 
residual humanism (animals are poor in world and rocks and stone are 
worldless, Martin insists), he is very close to a line of thought in a 
collection of Heidegger’s fragments published as/Overcoming 
Metaphysics/. Written between 1936 and 1946, these are Heidegger’s 
bleakest and most revealing ruminations, in my view. At their center 
stands an all-too-oblique critical engagement with National Socialism 
filtered through the lens of his willful reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger 
concludes his meditations with the words, “No mere action will change 
the world.” The statement finds its rejoinder in the title of 
Heidegger’s posthumously published 1966 interview with/Der Spiegel/: 
“Only a god can save us.” For Heidegger and Gray, there is no god, 
unfortunately, and we cannot save ourselves. It’s the belief that we can 
save ourselves that got us into our current mess. If political 
voluntarism is the motor of modernity’s distress, then the task becomes 
how we might think without the will.

This takes us to the compelling critique of the concept of action in 
Gray’s work. Whether Arendtian fantasies of idealized/praxis/, liberal 
ideas of public engagement and//intervention, or leftist delusions about 
the propaganda of the deed, action provides consolation for killer apes 
like us by momentarily staving off the threat of meaninglessness. The 
radical core of Gray’s work, unfashionable as it might seem, is a 
strident defense of the ideal of contemplation against action, whether 
the/bios theoretikos/of Aristotle or the/ataraxia/of the Epicureans. As 
Gray says in the final words of/Straw Dogs/, “Can we not think of the 
aim of life as being simply to see?”

But Gray’s ideological masterstroke is the fusion of his quasi-Burkean 
critique of liberalism, underpinned as it is by a deep pessimism about 
human nature, with a certain strand of Taoism. More particularly, what 
engages Gray is the ultra-skeptical illusionism of Chuang-Tzu, 
magnificently expressed in the subtle paradoxes of/The Inner 
Chapters./Chuang-Tzu writes, “How do I know that to take pleasure in 
life is not a delusion?” The answer is that I do not know and 
furthermore it doesn’t matter. Pushing much further than the furtive 
Descartes in his Dutch oven, Chuang-Tzu writes, “While we dream we do 
not know that we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream interpret a 
dream within it.” He concludes, “You and Confucius are both dreams, and 
I who call you a dream am also a dream.” There is no way out of the 
dream and what has to be given up is the desperate metaphysical longing 
to find some anchor in a purported reality.

/Homo rapiens/must learn to give up the destructive and pointless search 
for meaning and learn to see that the aim of life is the release from 
meaning. What interests Gray in the mind-bending paradoxes of Chuang-Tzu 
is the acceptance of the fact that life is a dream without the 
possibility, or even the desire, to awaken from the dream. If we cannot 
be free of illusions, if illusions are part and parcel of our natural 
constitution, then why not simply accept them? In the final pages 
of/Black Mass/Gray writes: “Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing 
oneself from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of 
death and renewal.” Rather than seek the company of utopian thinkers, we 
should find consolation in the words of “mystics, poets and 
pleasure-lovers.”

Such is the consoling company Gray keeps in/The Silence of 
Animals./There is much here that is familiar to readers of Gray, such as 
the critique of progress and the constant tilting at liberal humanism. 
There is also much that is welcome, such as the robust defense of Freud 
as a moralist based on Philip Rieff’s classic interpretation, which is 
wielded against Jungian obscurantism, the triumph of the therapeutic, 
and the desire to fill the Freudian void with grisly specters like the 
collective unconscious. But what’s new in/The Silence of Animals/is 
Gray’s argument for what he calls “godless mysticism” based largely on a 
reading of Wallace Stevens (it’s true that Stevens makes a couple of 
cameo appearances in Gray’s/The Immortalization Commission/from 2011). 
Stevens is the still point around which the world turns in/The Silence 
of Animals/.

Each of the three parts of/The Silence of Animals/is framed and guided 
by quotations from Stevens; what seems to draw Gray’s attention is the 
sheer austerity of his late verse, for example the 25 poems included 
under the title “The Rock” in the/Collected Poems/in 1954, the year 
before Stevens’s death. Stevens’s poetry self-consciously moves between 
the poles of reality and the imagination. In his most Wordsworthian 
mood, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the two poles would appear 
to fuse or be held in a creative balance: imagination grasps and 
transfigures reality. But in the very late poems, a hard, cold, 
contracted reality takes center stage. The power of imagination appears 
to be impoverished. The season of these late poems — always important 
for Stevens — changes from the florid and Floridian landscapes of the 
earlier verse to the harsh, unending cold of the Connecticut winter.

In the final poem in/The Palm at the End of the Mind/, “Of Mere Being,” 
Stevens speaks of that which is “Beyond the last thought,” namely a bird 
that sings “Without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign 
song.” Stevens seems to be saying that things merely are: the tree, the 
bird, its song, its feathers, the wind moving in the branches. One can 
say no more. For Gray, “The mere being of which Stevens speaks is the 
pure emptiness to which our fictions may sometimes point.” That is to 
say, in accepting that the world is without meaning, a path is indicated 
that takes us beyond the meaning we have made.

Paradoxically, for Gray, the highest value in existence is to know that 
there is nothing of substance in the world. Nothing is more real than 
nothing. It is the nothingness beyond us, the emptiness behind words, 
that Gray wants us to contemplate. His is a radical nominalism behind 
which stands the void. In this, as he is well aware, Gray is close to 
Beckett. We are condemned to words, but language is a prison house from 
which we constantly seek to escape. Rather than any comforting dogma of 
the linguistic turn, Gray is trying to imagine a turn away from the 
linguistic. Human language should be pointed towards a nonhuman silence.

In his very last poems, Stevens comes about as close as one can get to 
giving up poetry in poetry. It is poetry of the antipodes of the poetry; 
the hard, alien reality that we stare at, unknowing. All we have are 
ideas about the thing, but not the thing itself. Desire contracts, the 
mind empties, the floors of memory are wiped clean and nothingness flows 
over us without meaning. In a very late lyric that Gray does not cite 
but which he might, “A Clear Day and No Memories,” Stevens writes:

    Today the air is clear of everything.
    It has no knowledge except of nothingness
    And it flows over us without meanings,
    As if none of us had ever been here before
    And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
    This invisible activity, this sense.

It is “this sense” that Gray wants to cultivate in us, this turning of 
the self away from itself and its endless meaning-making and toward 
things in their variousness and particularity. The point is to undergo a 
kind of movement from the limitations of the human towards a greater 
inhuman realm of experience that can be had in the observation of 
plants, birds, landscapes, and even cityscapes. Stevens continues, with 
another “as if” (and whole books have been written on his use of 
hypothetical conjunctions):

    As if nothingness contained a métier,
    A vital assumption, an impermanence
    In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired.

Poems are words chosen out of desire, but words that don’t create 
anything permanent. In creating illusion, they assume impermanence. This 
is what Stevens sees as the métier of nothingness: its work, its craft, 
its supreme fictiveness. It is abstract. It must change. It must give 
pleasure.

Gray’s godless mysticism would retain the forms of askesis common to 
religious forms of mystical practice (fasting, concentration and prayer) 
that attempt to nullify the self. But this would be done not in order to 
attain a higher experience of “Self” [/sic/] or some union with god, but 
rather to occasion a turn towards the nonhuman world in its mere being. 
A godless mysticism would not redeem us, but would redeem us from the 
need for redemption, the very need for meaning. A redemption from 
redemption, then. Meaninglessness would here be the achievement of the 
ordinary, the life of the senses. This line of thought gets very close 
to what the philosopher Eugene Thacker has called a mysticism of the 
inhuman, a climatological mysticism expressed in the dust of the planet.

¤

There’s an unexpected local hero in/The Silence of Animals/: J.A. Baker 
(1926–1987), author of/The Peregrine/, a book that, to my shame, I 
didn’t know prior to reading Gray. It is the record of 10 years spent 
watching peregrine falcons in a narrow stretch of Essex countryside 
between Chelmsford and the coast. I happen to know that landscape quite 
well, or once knew it. It’s a minimal, flat landscape of neat fields, 
mudbanks, estuarial systems, and vast skies with huge clouds shuttling 
from west to east. In intense lyrical descriptions, Baker sought to 
escape the human perspective and look at the world through the eyes of 
this predatory bird, “Looking down, the hawk saw the big orchard beneath 
him shrink into dark, twiggy lines and green strips […] saw the estuary 
lifting up its blue and silver mouth, tongued with green islands.”

Baker was not crazy. He knew that there is no way out of the human 
world, and no way he could become a peregrine falcon. What interests 
Gray is the discipline (for Baker, an askesis of time, place and 
repetition: many days, months, and years spent returning to the same 
small strip of countryside) involved in peeling enough of oneself away 
in order to try to look outwards and upwards. Contemplation here is not 
some Hamlet-like, inward-facing attempt at stilling the self’s 
commotion. It’s the outward-facing decreation of the self through a 
cultivation of the senses. What’s being attempted is a 
non-anthropomorphic relation to animals and nature as a whole, where the 
falcon cannot hear the falconer. Gray’s godless mysticism asks us to 
look outside ourselves and simply see. This is a lot more difficult than 
it sounds.

¤

Schopenhauer, usually read in abridged, aphoristic form, was the most 
popular philosopher of the 19th century. Epigrammatic pessimism of his 
sort gives readers reasons for their misery and words to buttress their 
sense of hopelessness and impotence. Few things offer more refined 
intellectual pleasure than backing oneself into an impregnably defended 
conceptual cul-de-sac and sitting there, knowing and immovable. It’s the 
thrill of reading Adorno or, in a certain light, Agamben. Such is what 
Nietzsche called “European Buddhism.”

Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European 
Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural 
analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of 
liberal humanism. Counter to the upbeat progressivist evangelical 
atheism of the last decade, Gray provides a powerful argument in favor 
of human wickedness that’s still consistent with Darwinian naturalism. 
It leads to passive nihilism: an extremely tempting worldview, even if I 
think the temptation must ultimately be refused.

The passive nihilist looks at the world with a highly cultivated 
detachment and finds it meaningless. Rather than trying to act in the 
world, which is pointless, the passive nihilist withdraws to a safe 
contemplative distance and cultivates his acute aesthetic sensibility by 
pursuing the pleasures of poetry, peregrine-watching, or perhaps botany, 
as was the case with the aged Rousseau (“Botany is the ideal study for 
the idle, unoccupied solitary,” Jean-Jacques said). Lest it be 
forgotten, John Stuart Mill also ended up a botanist.

In a world that is rushing to destroy itself through capitalist 
exploitation or military crusades — two arms of the same/Homo rapiens/— 
the passive nihilist resigns himself to a small island where the mystery 
of existence can be seen for what it is without distilling it into a 
meaning. The passive nihilist learns to see, to strip away the deadening 
horror of habitual, human life and inhale the void that lies behind our 
words.

What will define the coming decades? I would wager the following: the 
political violence of faith, the certainty of environmental devastation, 
the decline of existing public institutions, ever-growing inequality, 
and yet more Simon Cowell TV shows. In the face of this horror, Gray 
offers a cool but safe temporary refuge.

Truth to tell, the world of Gray’s passive nihilist can be a lonely 
place, seemingly stripped of intense, passionate, and ecstatic human 
relations. It is an almost autistic universe, like J.A. Baker’s. It is 
also a world where mostly male authors and poets seem to be read, 
although Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind. As Stevens writes in 
his/Adagia,/“Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life 
is an affair of places and that is the trouble.” Gray, like Stevens, 
seems preoccupied with place but, unlike Stevens, appears untroubled. 
What Gray says is undeniable: we are cracked vessels glued to ourselves 
in endless, narcissistic twittering. We are like moths wheeling around 
the one true flame: vanity. Who doesn’t long to escape into an animal 
silence?

Of course,/love/is the name of the counter-movement to that longing. 
Love — erotic, limb-loosening and bittersweet — is another way of 
pointing outwards and upwards, but this time towards people and not 
places. But that, as they say, is another story.

Author’s Note: This essay builds from certain formulations that the 
reader can find in/The Faith of the Faithless/(Verso, London and New 
York, 2012). See Chapter 2, pp.109-117.

¤

/Simon Critchley's last book was/The Mattering of Matter. Documents from 
the Archive of the International Necronautical Society/(with Tom 
McCarthy, Sternberg, Berlin, 2012) and his next book is/Stay, Illusion! 
The Hamlet Doctrine/(Pantheon, New York, 2013)./ 
<http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=917>


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